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Central America produced some relatively good news. El Salvador's President Jose Napoleon Duarte won an election that was viewed from the outset as difficult even to hold, let alone conduct fairly. He perhaps endangered his own life by making a peace offering to the guerrillas. The direction of events was murkier in Nicaragua. The U.S. stirred up a storm among Congressmen and the nation's allies when it came out that the CIA had directed the mining of Nicaraguan harbors in order to discourage Soviet and Cuban arms shipments. Reagan encountered further trouble over U.S. funding of the contra forces battling the Sandinista regime. The main opposition parties did not participate in the country's November elections, leaving the legitimacy of the Sandinistas in question.
China's Deng Xiaoping, TIME's Man of the Year in 1978, boldly delivered on his promises to open the Chinese economy and bring the world's most populous nation into the political and economic mainstream. The reforms that had allowed a small degree of capitalism and entrepreneurship in the countryside were slowly extended to the cities. In its new and frank acceptance of economic incentives, China took another historic turn away from Marx and Lenin and toward, in a sense, Peter Ueberroth.
TO BELIEVE IN YOUTH
If Ueberroth is an impresario embodying the renewed American spirit, that elan has taken up residence most notably among the generation of Americans called yuppies, the young urban professionals (aged roughly from the mid-20s to the late 30s) who are supplying much of the bright entrepreneurial energy driving the American economy. In the late '70s, Japan's imitative wizardry and its mysterious cultural-economic consensus were the international model to copy. Today the model, the source of envy around the world, is the freewheeling private initiative of the U.S. Much of the improvisational magic, especially in the booming high-tech industries, comes from the yuppies.
A French advertising executive, Jacques Seguela, describes the phenomenon of the new America with a certain dogmatic Gallic eloquence: "The country that originally invented the consumer society is now inventing the communications society. Why has this been possible in America and not elsewhere? Because the U.S. is the only country where youth is credible. Individuals plunged into their professional lives in their 20s and are winners at 25 or 30. In France and elsewhere in Europe, that is impossible. You cannot go to a banker and say, 'I have a project involving imagination or new technology,' and ask for money if you are not 40 or 50 years old. That is the power of America: to believe everywhere and every time in youth."